Garden drive-by

It's been terribly hot and even more humid for over a week now, with heat advisories and ozone warnings to go along, so the only thing I've been doing with the garden lately is going out to water it in the evening.

But I had a new tomato to plant, courtesy of my friend S, and it's been waiting on me since last Monday. After Indy's walk, the sun wasn't hitting the garden yet, so I figured I had about half an hour to work before things got unbearable.

The rest of the peppers are now caged:

Last year my pepper plants got really tall and leggy, and then blew over in a mid-summer thunderstorm. I'd like to avoid that this year!

First banana pepper:

The new tomato is planted:

It's either a peace vine cherry tomato or a pineapple tomato, which is described as a "large beefsteak style tomato sometimes weighing up to two pounds." Crazy!

And the cucumber gates are up:

Last year the cucumber plant spread out laterally and took over an entire corner of the garden. I'm hoping I'll be able to convince it to grow up instead of out this year. The gates are from a fence one of my coworkers tore down. Hooray for recycling!

Now, we wait and watch!

Weeks 5 & 6

Cucumber:



Tomatoes:

Boxcar Willie
Amish Paste

Zucchini:



Peppers:



Raised bed:




Whole garden at week five:

Another morning in the garden

I got a bag of strawberry plants from someone on Freecycle on Tuesday, and had plans to find an old wading pool or sandbox to use as a planter. But it was really hot Tuesday and Wednesday, and so by yesterday morning, the strawberries were looking pretty pathetic. So instead, they went into the herb annex that I built last month.

This is how it looked when I started. Weeds inside and out:


Bed plus one hundred pounds of topsoil, bought for $1.19 per forty-pound bag at Rural King:


Strawberries planted, plastic border and landscape fabric added to help keep the grass and weeds from coming back:



Christmas basil from J Dog, planted in the empty front corner of the pea / lettuce / onion bed:



Sunshade MacGyvered from the rainfly off of our old, busted tent. It worked really well, actually!



I also extended the newspaper and fabric cover out to the edge of the herb strawberry annex. Reclaiming a garden from grass is a bit of a constant, Sisyphean task, but we're plugging away.



Finally, some baby vegetables:

Week four

Because gardens are paved with good intentions, I meant to get fences up for the peas to climb long before they started wrapping around each other, but never got around to it. MB and I both had the weekend off, so I enlisted his help on Saturday morning to instill some order in the raised bed.

Before:  tangled and shamefully weedy


After:  happily fenced and nicely (for now) weeded and mulched




Most of the plants are doing pretty well, though a few are still disconcertingly small. We now have one baby tomato and one baby zucchini!

Cucumber, strangely scrawny:

Tomatoes:
We put trellis-type cages around two on Saturday and I put a traditional cage around the third big one today. The trellis cages were a bit hard to put up, but I think the traditional cage was actually a bit harder. We'll see if the tomatoes do better in one vs. the other.
(No idea what's up with Mr. Runty there on the far right by the roll of wire.)

Zucchini:

Peppers:


Indy, keeping an eye on us from inside a nearby bush:



And look! The new hostas are huge:

Week three

Cucumber:

Tomatoes:

Zucchini:

Peppers:

Raised bed (peas, lettuce, green onions):

Almost finished!

Last Sunday, I finished laying the landscaping fabric and enlisted MB's help in putting up the first part of the fencing. Last year the chicken wire did a good job keeping rabbits out of the vegetables, but I didn't want to have gaps between the real fence and the wire, because that's part of what led to our weed problems. I'm hoping that lining the chainlink fence with the chicken wire will do the trick.



The raised bed is kicking ass:



On Wednesday, I picked out the veggie plants.


Moonflower seeds from EvilDucky, soaking:



Yesterday the promised rain held off and I got the veggies in the ground. Because last year my zucchini plant fell victim to some kind of wasting phenomenon, possibly caused by a nematode in the soil, I figured I'd try keeping it out of the ground this time around. Luckily, I scored a giant planter on clearance at Lowe's for a dollar:


Since I'm basically making this up as I go along, I picked my veggies based mostly on their names. And let's be honest. Boxcar Willie? That is awesome. AWESOME.

I made a map of where everything is so that as the summer goes on and my memory utterly fails, I'll still be able to figure out what's what:



First week photos!

Cucumber, week 1:

Tomatoes, week 1:

Zucchini, week 1:

Peppers, week 1:

And while I was working, look who was chillin like a very dapper villain:


Now he's noticed that I've noticed him, and is studiously ignoring me because he knows I'm going to tell him to get off the table:



And finally, today I planted snapdragons and moss roses in the little bitty corner bed by the front gate:



And added an annex onto the raised bed for herbs:


A few more buckets of fill dirt, and it'll be ready.

What I did on Friday

Someone on freecycle was giving away tansy starts, and since the mosquitoes are bad in our neighborhood and mosquitoes supposedly don't like tansy, I went to get some. I planted a bunch around the edges of the garden, which took a while but turned out pretty nice, I think. The plants look really pitiful because they were all naked in the sun for a few hours while I got the landscaping fabric rolled out. I'm hoping the rain we had today will perk them up:



The lady was super nice, and also gave me a big chunk of lemon balm, some lilies, some little bluebell-type flowers, and two yellow iris starts. Hot damn! I planted all that stuff in our front bed, which was mulched but otherwise untouched:



And some bonus pics. Morning glories from Danger & MacGyver, planted in the tiny corner bed by the front gate:


Huge mess of huge-ass bush pieces that I had to cut up:


Robins' nest on the carport gutter. It's cute, but I'm half afraid one of them will attack my head when I take out the trash or something. Gah.